I abandoned Through the Darkest of Times. Why? Well, to be honest it’s just because the game forced me to a dead end and I wasn’t able to continue playing it and finish it. This is a great game, at least good. I enjoyed it a lot. But just a disclaimer, it’s not a game to be played once, finished and shelved. Because in your first playthrough, you will not be able to achieve much.

There is also the very big chance of coming across a dead end like me. Checkpoint system is broken so a few mistakes again and again cause you to get stuck like me and force you to start a totally new playthrough. I, just wasn’t up to doing that while playing the game. It’s also an emotionally difficult game by the way.

There are these story moments that are fixed, they always happen. And they show you some brutal realities of living in Germany at those times. I really liked those narrative parts and the gameplay is fun but like I said, it’s not totally my style of game because it just wants you to start over and over again. Learn from your mistakes, get stronger and reach the end with that.

Again, that’s not for me. I really recommend this to you though. Check it out. Especially if you enjoyed something like “This War of Mine”, this is totally for you. This is a good game, just not for me with some aspects. And even in that case, I appreaciated parts of it a lot.

Unha xoia que define como facer dun xogo un arma para a aprendizaxe política e histórica. Meternos nun grupo da Resistencia contra os nazis no Berlín dende a subida ao poder de Hitler até o fin da 2ª GM é algo xa mil veces feito, pero nunca dunh maneira tan persoal e desoladora como neste xogo. As decisións que tomamos importan moito, e asistimos tanto a situacións reais concretas como a encontros que sucederon mil veces. É difícil desenganchar unha vez estamos dentro e a loita pola estratexia correcta mantendo a moral alta, o apoio de seguidores, unha boa situación económica para poder facer accións é desoladoramente difícil, como ocorre realmente nun grupo político antifascista, e máis nese momento histórico.
A interface, sendo simple, funciona moi ben unha vez entramos, e mola moito que tanto a nosa personaxe como as que imos atopando se xeren aleatoriamente, permitindo xuntar comunistas con socialdemócratas, anarquistas ou con cristiáns na loita contra o mal maior e obrigándonos a apoiarnos en intelectuais, obreiros e comunidades relixiosas para poder sobrevivir na defensa dos perseguidos.
Se iso, só lle boto en cara o feito de pegar saltos temporais que reinician o noso traballo, estropeando a experiencia nivel de acadar obxectivos.

Ich finde es wichtig, dass Spiele wie dieses gemacht werden und ich wünschte, ich könnte sagen, dass es einen wertvollen kulturellen Beitrag leistet, aber leider ist es noch nicht ganz da.
Der Widerstand während des dritten Reiches ist ein starkes Setting, und der graphische Stil passt auch perfekt zur Thematik.
Das Spiel gibt eine gute Übersicht über die Geschehnisse, allerdings ist es noch etwas zu langatmig.
Ich bin mir auch nicht sicher, ob Management der passende Fokus für so ein Spiel ist, da ich persönlich das Gefühl habe, dass das Handhaben von Werten, um ein optimales Ergebnis zu haben, dehumanisierend wirken kann, was man bei diesem Spiel auf jeden Fall nicht möchte.
Ich persönlich konnte leider auf emotionaler Basis einfach keine richtige Verbindung aufbauen, was wirklich schade ist.

Lead a resistance group in Germany from the time when Hitler is appointed chancellor to the end of WWII.

You start by hitting a randomize button until you get a political affiliation and job type you like (your stats consisting of empathy, literacy, strength, secrecy, propaganda are not chosen by you) followed by altering your appearance. You view your character and two other random people in a hideout before getting access to the map where you can choose active events to send your characters on missions. Two activities will quickly get you two more characters, with one being chosen from a random pool of three.

Your goal is to keep your group active by continuing to gain supporters and maintaining your five members (including yourself) that you send out on activities, ideally while completing the prerequisite activities and collecting the needed items to take on the few big missions included in each of the four chapters. Many activities lead to nothing of value narratively (as the accompanying text amounts to little more than you did thing) or reward wise. You can support labor strikes, hide persecuted people, try to help your neighbors, do events that sound more interesting like passing on information to the press or spies for other countries, etc but all that never really matters as it doesn't lead to anything except maybe some of those spy events being an easier path to collecting an item you need. While there is a lack of information on what can be effecting what in certain scenes, your chances of fighting or hiding from encountered harassers or soldiers, and what some actions even do, there is way to much information on the set events that will lead to your attempted goal.

Once you complete an event to talk to a contact, you are shown a full chain of everything that can come from that first event. Hand out books - spy on activities - steal uniform or hand out leaflets - gain access to factory - steal gas. There is nothing interesting or unique that ever happens within the normal gameplay, you just send the best of your mostly random characters that you hope work out for you to do what they are naturally best at, and likely see them constantly continue to arouse suspicion of them until you bring that down through another type of activity. With some events having descriptions like finding a hidden entrance to keep out of sight while the end event text tells you that you were spotted anyway. When attacked, caught by witnesses or police, or when your characters start randomly fighting or having a panic attack you can choose to run, hide, or brute force their way through the job with hide saying it might give you some of the reward and brute force being more dangerous but able to give you everything. Obviously this makes little sense when many missions can't split their reward in half, or when it comes to what hiding for an in group dispute would mean.

The actions of your resistance group is almost entirely based around your five characters and you only get to know a little about them through the event that happens at the start of each day. They are never going to be anyone you care about, their actions can seem widely conflicting, and their moods and statements have no relation to what you have been having them do or how you have been doing. Things been really bad and morale is low you might get an event where they thank you for starting the group, things been going good well your best leveled and most useful character (or only useful character in one needed area thanks to them all being random) just left the country or became a traitor. Even events like someone being discovered as a traitor is dull as what happens is that another member just says someone is a spy and you can choose to keep them or kick them out, if you keep them then maybe you get an event later where they don't show up one day and the other person says they were a spy again, if they were it had no effect on the actual gameplay.

While good, the story events can be better handled, some might happen based on your political affiliation (on the much worse for you personally side if you are a communist and seeing former friends joining with the Nazis in the others) but your stats and background have no effect on your choice results and nothing done in the scenes effecting your personal life tend to matter. When you are doing the larger group events possible in each chapter you end up getting options with percentage chances to succeed but I never had anything cause me to fail the event, and I didn't know if the percentage changes were only based on my own characters mostly random stats. A general lack of information when it comes to what does what and the effects stats are having on anything outside of mission prep and danger rate (if anything).

Short events tend to do a better job showing the growing fascism and gleeful talk of genocide by neighbors and other people you used to or have to associate with, both showing how it really was in Germany at the time and often how people in the US, Israel, Steam's forum posters on this game, etc will happily support genocidal actions and fascism after years of propaganda and being given made up enemies or after finding a government supportive of just being an objectively evil person but the events that showcase historic moments and shifts in power and propaganda are so short and then never really focused on again that the game feels like it is missing out on using historical moments more to tell a better story or to build on your group member's characterization.

None of the games mechanics really come together well, a lot of it is going to be based on failing and not being able to do everything, fitting for the setting, but like most games that try that it offers nothing interesting in return. Not succeeding or reaching as many mission events as possible just means that you get less of the writing and art, if someone dies no one cares if someone is captured you get a mission to free them but that's just choosing the people to send and getting them back if you succeed just taking time away from completing your goals for the chapter. Every chapter jumps ahead a few years so you lose anything you did in the previous except for character level ups that allow you to increase one of their stats by one so there isn't even much feel of your group growing or things escalating much when it comes to the majority of your missions and actions.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1392748114956619778

A fascinating concept weighed down by its incompatible gameplay systems. Part real time strategy game, part choose-you-path visual novel. The strongest points are seeing your character interacting with key parts of German history against the rise of Hitler's government. The terror of getting caught, and the real-world knowledge of where everything leads, fuels a lot of intense moments.

But that all gets lost in the "mission planning" gameplay, where you send resistance members out on missions, balancing their skills and stats to mitigate failure or disaster, and hoping for the best. The missions are all very broad and generalized to account for the fact that you could send any combination of your Supporters out to solve them, so none of the weight of the story is present. After awhile, you're just rushing through checklists and patterns in a tedious manner, your supporters boiling down to their stats more than their personalities or histories. I understand the function is to outline the grueling work of planning an underground resistance campaign, but it still got a little tiring for me.

I think this still contains a really great way to "interact" with history. To say I was disturbed at being reminded how many of these "ancient" events had been quietly repeating themselves in recent years is an understatement. This game could probably be an excellent example of "video games as educational tools).